Dr. Rhoberta Shaler is the 'Relationship Help Doctor'. She provides urgent and on-going care for relationships in crisis. She particularly helps the partners, the exes, adult children, and co-workers of the crazy-making, relentlessly difficult people that she calls, 'Hijackals'. She helps them save their sanity and stop the crazy-making. Even the United States Marines have called on Doctor Shaler for help. She's a relationship expert and speaker and author of 16 books. She consults with clents world-wide through the internet and she's host of two podcasts. One is called 'Emotional Savvy: The Relationship Help Show' and the other podcast is called 'Save Your Sanity: Help For Handling Hijackals'.

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Effect on Emotions

I think mindfulness levels your emotions. It doesn't take out the peaks and valleys, but you understand that you choose the state that you stay in.

Thoughts on Breathing

Well, I think it's key to everything. When you stop and you allow yourself to let your shoulders down from your ear lobes, you take a deep breath and you open your chest and you open your heart at the same time.

Then when you allow yourself to take a deep breath, it takes 20 seconds for the oxygen and a deep breath to go all the way around your blood system.

So you refresh yourself completely. So when you are using your breath, you are actually regenerating yourself and when you do that it calms you and helps you think more clearly.

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Bullying Story

I was in the education world for a long time as a teacher and then I became a school administrator and it was at a time that really stands out for me.

When I had the opportunity, I was given an entire extra classroom to do what I wanted. So every morning I would have all the children including all the special needs children sit in a big circle and I invited their parents to come and spend that first 20 minutes of the day with us.

And why I did that was there was a lot of unrest. There was a lot of children who were difficult and a lot of special needs children. And there were of course bullies in the mix.

And so if we're all participating in something, it became something that everybody then said, okay, to. There were not any people who were not doing it.

And what we saw during that time where we would just sit quietly, maybe we'd play with energy a little bit, you know, we'd rub our hands together and make energy, go round the circle or we'd do a visualization or whatever.

We saw a real change and then I had an opportunity to be the administrator of a school for at risk teenagers. And of course there was a lot of this going on, you know, make them do this and all that when I got there.

And I know that's not the way it's going to work, we're going to feed them.

And so, we made a huge change. These kids who were going out and stealing cars and doing home invasions on the weekends; through love and sitting quietly, they changed.

From the time that I went there to work, Bruce, the average length of time a child was staying in the school was three months.

By the time I left five years later, we had not had a vacancy for 18 months.